"We are currently evaluating Alfresco/Nuxeo. I got Nuxeo authenticated against Active Directory using LDAP pretty quickly. But I can not get Alfresco authentication working using LDAP(Active Diretory) even after few days struggling"

martes, 17 de marzo de 2009

Daniel Téllez pointed this comparison between Alfresco and Nuxeo, in the Nuxeo Group at Linkedin.
The writer, Jonas Sigurdsson, was a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft. Currently works at Gagnavarslan ehf as a Development Manager.
I found it tremendously interesting. Go ahead and read it, it's worth it:

"Here is my view of the two after some research. Note that these are my conclusions after evaluating the two platforms - not scientific facts.

1. Open Source vs. "You can read *OUR* source"

Nuxeo is a typical company backed open source project. The project has a somewhat growing community but coding activity is still mostly done by Nuxeo employees. The project is managed from a single branch and community members can submit code. Stabilized releases immediately become available. Mailing lists are moderately active. There is a general feel of openness around everything and friendly atmosphere.

Alfresco interpretation of open-source is quite confusing to me. The product comes in two flavors.

• Labs: Open source branch which is never stabilized (bug fixes are merged along with new features so you can never know if the code is perfectly stable). This branch is not recommended for any production work. It does not include all automated tests. This version is supported for testing and experimenting only.
• Enterprise: Stabilized closed-source commercial version. This version is tested and stabilized and will cost you somewhere around €16k pr. CPU (not including high availability / clustering nor WCM).

Alfresco appears to have active community in forums but I often wonder how much of it is truly "community" and how much of it is actually done by their employees or contractors. Also, I wonder if Alfresco partners are allowed to support the Labs version at all.

2. Out of the box functionality.

Out of the box, Alfresco feels much like MS Sharepoint. It's obvious IMO that Alfresco is locating the platform as "The Open Source Sharepoint alternative".

In that way Alfresco has more offering out of the box. You can see that Alfresco is venture backed company with considerable resources. Recently they have been moving in giant leaps where every new release contains massive improvements and amazing new features. Lot's of cool stuff related to collaboration and web 2.0 style application development can be found in the new Surf platform. The content repository is also extremely scalable and loaded with advanced with features like Web Project Branching, CIFS, etc.

Nuxeo feels more like a platform then a complete product out of the box. It does not give the same easily accessible user experience as Alfresco but as soon as you start diving into it you can sense that it is very powerful and well thought out. I have noticed that technical people (IT admins) tend to favor Alfresco with it's Sharepoint like portal UI and "just another CIFS file share" approach where Information specialists and Record managers favor the clean structure of Nuxeo's "Record + Attachments" approach which is more aligned with best practices in record/document management.

Nuxeo offers lots of extra features, like WSS, email integration, etc. but much of those are extensions you need to find, download and install on your own.

3. Extensibility

Both platforms are very extensible.

Alfresco extensibility is based on AOP which is very flexible although sometimes difficult to grasp.

Nuxeo has managed to keep many great ideas from their previous Zope based system integrating those ideas with a modern JEE application stack. Nuxeo is very extensible and well designed. Everything is pluggable using extension points which is a great pattern and considerably less confusing to mange in large-scale, heavily customized systems compared to AOP (IMHO).

4. Even more opinionated points...

I guess it's obvious from above notes that I favor Nuxeo. For me they key selling points are:

• True Open Source model. Truly open project and friendly atmosphere for outside contributors.
• Strong company behind the product with solid funding providing range of services.
• Great looking and solid code. Utilizing best of breed Java technologies.
• Strong design-patterns for building on the platform and credible future road-map.

There is one issue with Nuxeo I must mention since we have been postponing our work with Nuxeo while we wait for the upcoming 5.2 release. This is because Nuxeo is moving away from the Jackrabbit repository to a new SQL database based repository system. I think this is a wise decision but it leads to a period where you don't want to start a new project using the current version given how different the upcoming version is going to be. Also, considering that this is *the repository* it might take some time and minor upgrades before you will trust it for your customer's valuable data. On the other hand I have full faith in Nuxeo to deliver a solid solution here in due time.

sábado, 7 de marzo de 2009

Edit: March 17, 2009. We found another article comparing Alfresco and Nuxeo. You can read it here.We intend to make this article an objective comparison between the two tools of ECM and DMS (Enterprise Content Management, Document Management System) which have been proven strongest in the market of open source software over other important solutions such as KnowledgeTree or OpenKM. The tools to be compared are Nuxeo 5 and Alfresco.
You can read our blog in english or visit our website.

To make the comparison, we will focus on 6 different perspectives: usability, functionality, technology, price, community and partners.

Usability

Jackob Nielsenhas defined usability as the quality attribute that measures how easy it is to use Web interfaces. In our experience, we used Alfresco since mid-2006 for a project in one of our clients, the Local Governmentof Malaga. In addition, more recently, we used the Community version that allows Alfresco to use from your web site in demo mode (connecting to their servers with accounts).

The personal view has been that Alfresco has a difficulty, and even say that unattractive.

The facts and our experience support this statement: some customers of Alfresco Enterprise (I2BC, Málaga) and of the now called Alfresco Community Labs (Sutega, La Coruña) confirm that Alfresco is not attractive to workers of their companies, who say the software is difficult to handle. Moreover, from I2BC we have known of the existence of projects like Opsoro, who make web based interfaces (frontends) friendlier for Alfresco.

Improving interfaces of Alfresco is in itself an Open Source business model.

In this sense, Nuxeo provides Nuxeo WebEngine as a creator of websites for free and completely Open Source. With this tool, you can create totally user-oriented portals without sacrificing all the benefits of records management.

On the other side, the Nuxeo user interface, similar to the one they had in the CPS project, (which is an Open Source ECM that began in 2000 on Python and Zope technologies and twas collaborative and had "web 2.0" functionality long before there was this term around) is clear, sharp. It's nice to work on it.

In the picture we see the Nuxeo ECM personalized with the corporate identity of Yerbabuena Software.

Besides Nuxeo WebEngine and its own web interface, Nuxeo provides a desktop application to manage content stored very fast, it is Nuxeo RCP.

The score on Usability is, therefore, to Nuxeo:

Nuxeo 1- 0 Alfresco

Functionality

Drag & Drop

Using Drag & Drop, the ability to drag content (files and folders) to the browser to create content (upload documents to the repository) is used for both document management systems. However, and again with the experience of a client of Alfresco Community, told us that this functionality is completely unstable, having tested a large number of different settings (Firefox 3, IExplorer 7 etc.).
The drag & drop of Nuxeo is 100% stable. I use it daily, and several of our clients as well. Goes like silk, only time I saw it fail it was on an old version in Explorer 7, and it's been over 8 months of that.
For reference, the case studyprogram EVA, belonging to the Andalusian Government. And there are more customers.

Live Edit

Live editing lets you edit Microsoft Office documents, Open Office and other very usual formats to work directly with your browser. To see the functionality, nothing better than a video. In Nuxeo, we can use online editing of documents in a large number of configurations: Linux or Windows (XP and Vista) Explorer or Firefox, MS Office or Open Office. Besides, each one of them with multiple versions (Office 2003 and 2007, Firefox 2.X and 3.X, Explorer 6 and 7 ... etc). Totaling more than 60 possible combinations.
At Alfresco, you can see an official with the topic started January 29. Users do not have information that they can not use FireFox (are forced to use Microsoft's browser, which is not exactly free ...) and install a SharePoint module ...
And the answer: This is a feature that Nuxeo resolved months ago, and which offers not only the online edition using Firefox, but using Ubuntu + Firefox + Open Office! We participated actively in the development version of Ubuntu + OpenOffice.

Virtual Browsing (Tags).
Both Document Management Systems allow users to "tag" (label) content to browse through the information using these tags. Nuxeo calls this "virtual browsing" and it makes sense for matters such as browsing the content of different countries (Europe images together) and then switch to browsing folders by "themes" for example images of Economics on the one hand, on the other sports ...

Versions
Both platforms also allow for easy management of versions. Version increases, the recovery of previous versions or consulting the history of actions on a document are incredibly easy.

Search.
Both Alfresco and Nuxeo base the search on standard open tools such as Lucene and Open Search. These search engines index all the documents (title and total content) in and resolve searches in less than 1 second ("google" style).

Workflows.

Both in Alfresco and Nuxeo, the workflow engine is based on JBPM (Java Business Process Management) and the use of workflows, involving users of the system is very simple. But this feature also tilts the balance back in favor of Nuxeo, the interface management on Alfresco's workflows forces the user to do too many steps to start them, because the wizard's too long.

Total: After tying in several features, Alfresco is surpassed by Nuxeo due to desktop integration.

Nuxeo 2-0 Alfresco

Technology

Both tools are based on J2EE architecture, with JBoss as application server and a set of standards for access to documents such as CIFS, WebDAV and so on.
Correction: Nuxeo does not implement (as of now) the CIFS access interface. Nuxeo will do this as soon as a customer needs it. In my opinion it's not a very important feature, but it may be for some customers. We have to thank Luis Sala, of Alfresco, for this correction.

Moreover, both platforms are developing the CMIS standard for document management, with companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, EMC Documentum and Open Text. The technology improvement provided by Nuxeo is in the architecture itself: the Nuxeo Core easily allows for the development of other deployments from Nuxeo (something not as easy with Alfresco). As the Chairman of Nuxeo, Stefane Fermigier states in a comparison published in CMS Wire "We have designed the Nuxeo software with the explicit goal of creating an Architecture of Participation [...] Our creation of Nuxeo Runtime, the GSO-based plugin system i (inspired by Eclipse's), our use of a component framework like JBoss Seam for our webapp, are consequences of this vision, which comes from years of experience working with System Integrators and ISV. "

"We have designed the Nuxeo software with the goal of creating an architecture of participation [...] The creation of Nuxeo Runtime, the plugin system based on OSG-i (inspired by Eclipse), our use of a framework of components like JBoss Seam for our webapp, are consequences of this vision that comes from years of experience working with systems integrators and ISV (Independent Software Vendors, software vendors).

Thanks to how Nuxeo is structured we can modify the functionality of Nuxeo without making any changes in your source code through "extension points". With these extension points contributions can be made ranging from adding vocabulary to the creation of new document types or actions through versioning policies, security policies, audit policies, storage policies, and many more.
Alfresco's code (and we know what we are talking about) is cumbersome and difficult to handle, and in this respect very little has been improved recently.

Nuxeo 3-0 Alfresco

Price" Both companies derive significant percentages of their revenue from providing support subscriptions. Alfresco charges something like US$ 10,000 per CPU while Nuxeo charges on a per "application" basis, with a tiered program that starts at about US$ 15,000 per application. So depending on your scale and the support requirements you have, annual support costs could be significantly different. These parameters can vary a lot, so its not clear there are real cost differences here. However it would seem that on average a customer will pay more to get started with Alfresco."

In the case of our company, and as Partner Integrator of Nuxeo, we have an annual support cost for companies with a recommended range of 10 to 100 users in an amount of approximately € 3600, representing a 55% lower price compared to the minimum price for Alfresco.

"I am a Documentum developer and would like to possibly consider learning and promoting adoption of Alfresco, but I have a few problems/questions.

1) I'm trying to decide between Alfresco and Nuxeo.Alfresco seems to have more momentum (pardon the Documentum pun) in US, but at least Nuxeo is fully Open Source, meaning all the source including bug fixes that have not been included in a release are always available."

And in the same post:

"3) Other than market exposure, and give the fully Open (in the sense of open source) approach of Nuxeo, why would someone choose Alfresco instead?"

The number of responses is the most controversial, including some participants in the conversation that instead of talking about Nuxeo refer to the company as Nutseo "(Nuts means "crazy "," stupid "). A sign of elegance and respect within the Free Software community!

By the way, I love the phrase that speaks about "Other than market exposure" There are products like Windows Vista that have failed miserably, despite a strong promotional marketing (as only Microsoft can do), then this is no guarantee of anything.

Conviene aclarar aquí al lector que Alfresco, aparte de dar acceso restringido al código a los que no son clientes o partners (y cobran a los partners, y por supuesto a los clientes también!), no publica la corrección de errores en sus versiones, algo que en la comunidad de Nuxeo si ocurre... Should be clarified here to the reader that Alfresco apart from giving restricted access to the code to non-customers or non-partners (and they charge partners, and of course the customers too!), Alfresco does not publish the correction of errors in their versions, something that happens in the community of Nuxeo... code flows naturally and without restrictions. 100% Free (Open Source) Software.
It is also recalled that Alfresco has an Enterprise version, to pay (and very expensive) and not certified called Labs (Community), with advertising in the footer of your site to recruit support and warning that there is no guarantee (how beautiful messages in the system where I'll work!).

However, a 100% Open Source and Free of charge Nuxeo Enterprise, does not distinguish between the versions for "rich and poor." There is only one way, one version. No ads. . Unrestricted access to the code. Purely open.
Speaking of licenses: "The Nuxeo Core is LGPL, which is broadly described as "business friendly" and is the same license successfully used by projects like JBoss "

Speaking of access to the code:Alfresco's Community Network edition repository is wide open , but their commercial Enterprise Network edition is not. Nuxeo has ONE repository for the Enterprise Platform and it is open to the public.

Access to Fixes, Patches:

"Access to Fixes . Related to the second point, with a repository that is shared by Nuxeo developers and the Nuxeo community, it follows that all Nuxeo fixes are immediately available to anyone in the community that can make a build. On the other hand, the Alfresco community must wait for any Alfresco Enterprise fixes to be merged from the Enterprise to Community repositories. This is a process that can take time. There's a big difference here. The Nuxeo community immediately benefits from the support activities related to paying customers. The Alfresco community does not." Moreover, Nuxeo provides full access to its JIRA (project management tool) so that any developer or user can report tasks ( suggestions, improvements etc).

Nuxeo 5-0 Alfresco

Partners

For Partners and the many places in the world covered by these, Alfresco is clearly superior to Nuxeo. It has more presence, more impact. But as said before citing the case of Windows Vista, the media, the size of companies and capital will not guarantee that software is of high quality. They Help .. but do not guarantee that a software is of high quality.

By the way, speaking of partners. We are partners of Nuxeo, integrators in Spain and latin america. And we have not paid one euro. Not one.
We were invited to by Nuxeo.

Nuxeo 5-1 Alfresco

Conclusion

Nuxeo seems (and we are increasingly convinced) an ECM platform with a powerful document management functionality more usable, better designed, with a vibrant community, more open and with more competitive prices.

About Us

Yerbabuena Software is a Spanish company, based in Madrid and Malaga. The content expressed in this article is only intended to inform anyone who is interested in implementing a document management tool, particularly for document management based on Free Software, to make a choice with as much information as possible .
At no point it is our intention trying to glorify or to shrink any viable, competitive and highly profitable companies, such as Alfresco and Nuxeo, but to provide information and experiences.
The future of ECM market is Open Source, same as the IT sector in general. We do not bet for the prevalence of one tool over another, but for the coexistence of different tools with a different focus in each.